Page:Otto Wilhelm Kuusinen - The Finnish Revolution (1919).pdf/10

 Socialism finds a place in its programme as the goal to be aimed at, and that, in a certain measure, it is a factor in the general trend of the true or "immediate" programme of Social-Democracy. But on the whole it is only a Utopian ornament, seeing that it is impossible even to imagine Socialism as realisable within the bourgeois society, in the framework of which the practical action of Social-Democracy is nevertheless enclosed. The road historically unavoidable for passing from the bourgeois into the socialist society, the road of revolution and of the dictatorship of the armed proletariat is quite outside the conscious, practical field of operation of Social-Democracy; it begins only where the action of Social-Democracy ends.

The relations of a consistent Social-Democracy with revolution are just as passive as those of a tolerant historian with respect to the revolutionaries of past times. "The Revolution is born, not made." is the favourite expression of Social-Democracy, for it considers that it is not its sphere to work in support of revolution. It has on the contrary a natural tendency to delay the revolutionary explosion. This is easy enough to understand from the view-point of the true practical object of Social-Democracy: the revolutionary movement distrusts its action and threatens to interrupt it. Now as one cannot, when it is a question of revolution, decide with absolute certainty whether it will lead at the first essay to victory or to defeat, it always, in tho event of revolution, seems possible that a danger threatens the gains of Social-Democracy's work of organisation, of its political conquests, its organisations, houses, libraries, newspapers, reforming laws, democratic institutions, acquired rights, etc. The whole practical action of Social-Democracy is founded on these benefits. They have become in part the intrinsic aim of its life; they are for the most port necessary to its future revolution and to its existence on the field of bourgeois legalism. That is why Social-Democracy strives by all means in its power to protect and conserve its conquests, even if danger threatens them from the side of the proletarian revolution.

Doubtless the doctrines of Social-Democracy, leaning in so doing on Marx, regard the conquests of organisation, their growth and conservation, as necessary in the very first place for the proletarian revolution. And evidently they are finally